Google to provide public disaster alerts using Tweets

After launching crisis response map for Uttarakhand floods last year, Google, announced on Tuesday, that its public disaster alerts will now include tweets from the places affected. It aims to provide truly timely information to peoples when they need it most.

This is expected to give people more context about what’s going on in their own areas, as a weather or other natural disaster-related PSA. It is a significant step to bring Twitter data back into Google products.

According to an announcement noticed from Appeared tweets, It might be used for:

Starting today, you can find relevant data from Twitter on a subset of Google Public Alerts. We launched Public Alerts to provide updates from official sources, such as the National Weather Service, via Google Now, Search, and Google Maps. Now, some of the more extreme Public Alerts will include Tweets to help answer important questions: are schools closing? Are neighbors evacuating? What are people seeing on the front lines of a storm?

Recently, both the companies couldn’t come to an agreement, deal collapsed publicly and Google introduced Real-Time Search. Google spokesperson told wired that tweets are sourced via Twitter’s public API and not the “firehose,” or real-time data stream. Google also reiterated that for now, tweets are only going to be used in public alerts and crisis responses, and there are no plans to bring back Twitter-powered real-time search or to use Tweets in other ways.

Now, Google is looking at all sorts of other social products it can use for Real-Time conversation on Google+ for public alerts. Also, Google has launched person finder tool to find missing people in Uttarakhand floods.